Ku Klux Klan activities at Stone Mountain are deep-rooted, although the original conception of the memorial pre-dates the 1915 revival of the Klan. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan was emboldened by the release of D. W. Griffith's Klan-glorifying film The Birth of a Nation, and by the lynching of Leo Frank, who was accused of the murder of Mary Phagan.
On November 25, 1915, a group of robed and hooded men met at Stone Mountain to create a new incarnation of the Klan, which had been dormant since it was suppressed by the federal government during Reconstruction. They were led by William J. Simmons, and they included a group calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan. A cross was burned, and the oath was administered by Nathan Bedford Forrest II, the grandson of the original Imperial Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, and was witnessed by the owner of Stone Mountain, Samuel Venable. (In reaction to this history, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech includes the line "let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.")
Fundraising for the monument resumed in 1923, and in October of that year, Venable granted the Klan easement with perpetual right to hold celebrations as they desired. Because of their deep involvement with the early fund-raising and their increasing political clout in Georgia, the Klan, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, were able to influence the ideology of the carving, and they strongly supported an explicitly Confederate memorial. Gutzon Borglum was commissioned to do the carving, and he became a Klan member in the course of his association with the Stone Mountain project. Of the $250,000 raised, part came directly from the Ku Klux Klan but part came from the federal government, which in 1924 issued special fifty-cent coins with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain
Nice to see the Klan and the ***US GOV'T*** cooperating so comfortably. :sarcasm:
(ETA: To be clear, Stone Mountain is not just the name of the mountain, but of the surrounding municipality.)